TSKD 269

The PrincessTranslation: SupremeTentacle
Editing: Exkalamity

“Next time I will surely win! You wait and see!”
“Kyuuiii!”

With those parting words we separated from Mare and Kuina and made our way towards the town of Roserraccoon. We asked them to come with us but they declined. For some reason the two of them wanted to avoid the town. Maybe they were involved in some sort of incident? Regardless we decided to let matters be and head towards the town ourselves.

“They were surely a lively pair.”
“Nn. Will win next time.”
“Woof!”
“Nn. Both of us.”

Our encounter was definitely a fruitful one. I got to see a hella gorgeous maid and Fran met Mare, the first person in her age group capable of putting up a good fight. We won the spar, and Mare didn’t seem like the type of fighter to pull her punches, but I wasn’t certain we would have won a serious death match. She was clearly holding onto some final trump card at the end. This fight will definitely encourage Fran’s growth as a warrior down the future. My only worry is that she may become too much of a battle junkie.

After walking for a distance, we spotted walls rising out of the horizon.

“Master, town spotted.”
“Yeah and it’s pretty big too. The walls are impressive. This is probably Roserraccoon.”
“Nn.”

As we approached the town we noticed a commotion outside the walls. Although it wasn’t strange for a town as large as this to be noisy, it was strange to see so many people milling around outside the walls. As we approached we saw that all the people were adventurers. There were about thirty of them, all trying to board the same horned carriage. Fran called out to one of the adventurers.

“Something happen?”
“Hah? The hell do ya want ki– WHOA HOLY SHIT!”

The man took a glance at Fran and cut himself short. He froze, one foot on the horned carriage, the other still on the ground, his eyes bulging out of their sockets.

“Well?”
“My ba-” he coughed. “My apologies.”

He clearly cleaned up his act the moment he saw Fran. He probably realized she evolved.

“Okay?” asked Fran.
“Yes,” he said. “We’re currently tasked with escorting a noble. Our destination is a town down south.”
“Adventurers for guards? Not soldiers?”
“Yeah. All the knights and soldiers are headed to the border. There aren’t any to spare.”
“Understood.”

It seems there were some extenuating circumstances in this case. Normally a noble will be escorted by knights and soldiers unless they wanted to travel incognito. In that case they would hire adventurers as escorts, but having a full entourage of thirty people was antithetical to staying under the radar. I urged Fran to continue questioning.

“So many people, cause trouble?” asked Fran.
“Well this amount is to be expected given we are escorting the princess herself,” he said.
“Princess, here?”
“Yeah. The guildmaster decided to go over the top with this escort commission.”

It seemed the guildmaster was trying to please the royal family by sending the princess a large group of guards.

“In fact you can see her over there,” the adventurer said.

We looked over towards the direction he indicated. There stood a girl in a very ostentatious, out of place dress.

Maybe we should go talk to her… We are pretty heavily indebted to the Beast Lord, after all.

That said her entourage was giving the surroundings quite the stink-eye.

Fran thanked the adventurer and we headed towards the princess. As we approached we suddenly felt something terribly wrong. A chill ran down our spines. It felt similar to when we were made subject to Coerced Camaraderie in Ulmutt. But maybe not that specifically. Were we appraised by the princess’ guards? Probably not since the sensation was very brief.

“Fran back off a bit.”
“Nn.”

We backed away about twenty meters and the offputting sensation disappeared. I then used magic perception and found some sort of active skill covering the entirety of the princess’ surroundings. I decided to try appraising the situation. I had to be very careful in case one of the guards had appraisal detection, I didn’t want Fran to be accused of a serious breach of privacy. It’s best to stay out of trouble.

I first made a copy of myself while still hiding behind Fran. I switched places with that copy so it looked like I was still on Fran’s back. Then I shrunk all the way down to about the size of a ping pong ball. Finally I teleported to right above the princess. Making myself smaller was harder than making myself larger, so I probably couldn’t keep this form for long. I recalled what Kuina did and made an illusion to blend into the sky behind me. I was able to get an appraisal but what I saw was really odd.

Why the hell is there some stuff in parenthesis? There’s a bunch of notable stuff like acting, royal guard, and even an appraisal disguise ring. Is the stuff in parenthesis things that are disguised that my max appraisal and Eye of Empyrea can see through? I can’t be certain since there might be stuff hidden behind an even stronger layer of disguise. Another confusing part is the “Princess (Royal Guard)”. I can’t tell if it means a guard of royal blood or a guard that specifically attends a person of royalty. I wanted to investigate further but appraisal disguise obscured any further details.

Either way, the princess looked really weak considering she was that Beast Lord’s daughter. Though, I guess it’s a bit unfair to compare her to someone that’s S ranked. Besides, she’s actually pretty good for a sixteen year old. The only real issue I saw was that her skill levels were low compared to her status level. Maybe someone carried the hell out of her? I highly doubted that the Beast Lord would powerlevel his daughter but that was the only way to explain the discrepancy.

Wait! Wasn’t she supposed to be fifteen?Did her birthday just pass?

I concluded that the source of my malaise was the appraisal disguise ring. She probably was not someone too suspicious given that the guildmaster was showing her out. Appraising some people around her, I found them to be court ladies and attendants so that made things seem even more legitimate. There likely wasn’t any danger in approaching her.

I slowly made my way back to Fran.

“Looks like we’re in the clear. We can go greet her”“Nn. Got it” she replied.

Since there currently was only one evolved black catkin and it was well known that it was a little girl, they should instead realize she was Fran. The Black Lightning Princess nickname was a good as identification and provided us a decent social standing in these parts.

We approached the princess and this time got close enough for her to notice us.

“Oh. Are you perhaps the Black Lightning Princess?” she asked.
“Nn.”
“Oi watch your mouth!” a guard shouted. “You are to address Her Highness with respect!”

Apparently he didn’t like how curtly Fran responded. But the princess reproached her guard.

“Stand down!” she said. “Do you recall that my father specifically ordered us to receive her graciously?”

Given the (Acting Lv7) it ought to be rather obvious she’s a fake/decoy. Don’t be too hard on our protagonist, though. When writing, you frequently want the audience to figure something out before the protagonist, but it’s hard to do that without making the protagonist look like a moron (since some of your readers are morons, you have to be super obvious or they won’t get it either). In other words, Sword bro suffers from MC-syndrome, it’s not his fault he’s stupid, he can’t help it.

Not his fault that he lacks our breadth of knowledge, he spends all his time admiring pretty lolis, and big titty maids with droopy eyelids, and hasn’t thought about all the clues he has in front of him. Not the first time he appraised someone and missed an obvious red flag, he just scans through looking for things that stand out, from a skill collector’s pov.

@Ulabab: If the protagonist’s obliviousness seems perfectly normal to you, you may just be an MC yourself!
Have you noticed a harem of randomly assorted hot chicks following you around recently desperately trying to get your attention?
😉

@Countrymage has a point – if this novel’s text had included a picture of the hot busty glasses-wearing battle-maid, I probably would have been too distracted to figure out anybody’s identity either. 🙂

Well considering the fact that both Mare and Kuina avoids going to the city pretty much proves that Nemea is probably a body double for the princess.

They probably took some random red catkin and power level her so she can be awakened to act as a body double which explains the lack of skills acquired.

Probably necessary since Mare is a battle junkie much like her dad and loves adventuring but the country would probably not allow both royalty to put themselves in the position of danger without a backup plan

Ulabab, she has a weak awakened form, wrong age, poor skills, hidden acting ability, hidden royal guard affiliation, an appraisal blocking ring, and the story just had them part with a shady fictional “white” catkin girl that used fire magic like the reds. One or two of those things would be suspicious, but taken together it should be obvious.

It’s funny how having a super-high STR enables you to lift boulders, and a super-high DEX/AGI stat enables you to dodge bullets, but having a super-high INT stat…doesn’t really ever seem to make characters any smarter.

From the description every time he appraises someone with plot significance, he isn’t receiving a download of info, he’s seeing a sheet, and it’s up to him to read and understand what he sees on it, also what he should memorize on it before returning it.

High INT means that you are smart enough to see the solution to a puzzle, but that doesn’t mean you have the wisdom to plot the moves that get you there.

Characters with super-high INT stats can’t be any smarter than the author’s personal limitation at depicting how smart that character is. It’s easy to have high-STR chars punch holes in a mountain or high-DEX plus AGI characters dodge laser beams from 10 feet away. But high-INT requires the author to not only come up with a brilliant solution but also with a tough clever problem too.

Common people won’t be able to block the skill. Every time it was blocked has always been by either rich people that can buy strong appraisal blocking artifacts or powerful individuals that can block the skill on their own. And since Fran is around those kind of people a lot lately it’s only natural that many of them can block or trick the skill.

In defense of his Appraisal failures, the Royalty of a major country (I think the beast kingdom was an entire continent on its own?) should probably have access to the highest possible world-treasure Artifact level magic items. Even so, despite not being able to see much of her real stats, the fact that he could appraise that she was wearing an “Appraisal Disguise Ring” means his skill saw through the most important part: The #1 thing an Appraisal disguise item needs to hide is the fact that you have equipped an appraisal disguise item. If it doesn’t do that, it’s already failed its job.

That Eye of Empyrea appraisal skill appeared to solve an appraisal plot problem. But the author got painted into a corner with that skill and has been ignoring it ever since. Gandalf says, Frôdô, you should fly to Mount Doom with Thorondor’s kin. Manwë’s voice booms out: Don’t you dare end the adventure so soon!

The author is known for baiting people into false assumptions (for example, how he presented the beast king).
This particular case with the princess/Mare is also fishy – it’s so obvious it can’t be true. But then again, Occam’s razor.

With this writing style, it is not as if we are provided more information than the protagonist, we see it from his point of view. So if an 18 year old young adult like myself who lives in the lesser areas of the UK and also doesn’t really excel at anything can easily figure out what is going on, I would expect the protagonist to know too.

Sometimes, I feel that the childish protagonist tag for this novel on novelupdates is referring to the sword and not the child.

You’ve read more novels with this same situation, than the mc has, he doesn’t have the option of scrolling back up to the stats page he scanned earlier, and he was mostly looking for perception affecting skills, like forced camaraderie.

the mc is a reincarnated japanese guy – he should have spent his previous lifetime reading LNs and WNs in order to prepare for this situation. there’s no excuse for his lack of proper preparation for isekai reincarnation!

Which is why you’ll end up in the realistic Dark Ages European isekai world, with plague rats running freely through your kitchen, shit all over the streets and walls, and they lynch weirdos that try to advance technology.

No, no, S.T. I’m not assuming all JP guys read novels. Of course they don’t. Clearly this guy didn’t. I’m saying *it’s their duty to!* As a random male JP under 30, one probably has at least, what, a 25-30% change of ending up in an isekai situation, maybe higher, either through transferrence or reincarnation after a surprise (often ironic) death? (Some females, too, but not as common) Therefore they should be responsible and prepare/research ahead of time! As we all know, the Japanese population decline/aging issue is a result of a large percentage of their younger population getting randomly sucked in to isekai fantasy worlds, and their government has just been covering it up for years by claiming it is because of “low birth rate”. As if.

So the princess was already said to be a tomboy around Fran age that the beast king hopes fran can be friends with. We meet Mare a tomboy with a high class assasin maid escorting her level grinding. She has super high end gear and stats are completly hidden. Clearly she is the princess and probably a mixed bloodof two beast races the king and a different race being why Fran couldn’t ID her beast race. Most likely she is avoiding the town because she skipped out on what she was suppose to be doing to go level (Something she probably does often.) So they have a stand in to fill in for her or just to hide her real identiy for saftey sake in general.

master didn’t realize it probably..
he think it impossible for the Princess to wandering without guards
thinking that the Maid is just babystiting Mare…
and logically the Daughter of Beast King should has same hair with Beast King, and since Mare is white, so he cannot link Mare with Daughter of Beast King.
the appraisal is got blocked and cannot seeing fully, so he think that her stats,skills, and title is fake.
[I concluded that the source of my malaise was the appraisal disguise ring. ]
his malaise is spot on, because its not real princess, but he think it because the ring.
and even though that is fake princess, in the front of those people, she is a “Princess” at the moment, so greet her is equally greet the real princess…

I honestly think Mare is the real princess… The beast king said Fran and her were similar. At first, when this said the princess was here, I thought I was wrong, but I might not be… Mare probably didn’t go to this town because this ‘princess’ was an imposter. Thanks for the chapter!